Blog Entry: The Field of Dreams Strategy

[mouser]

Jeff Atwood has posted a number of recent nice blog entries that are refreshingly against the current trend of focusing on monetizing everything and organizing everything to make money.  Here he introduces us to what Conant O'Brien calls the "Field of Dreams" strategy:

We have a tendency to fetishize audience metrics in the IT industry. Presenters stress out about about their feedback ratings and measure themselves by how many attendees they can attract for a presentation. Bloggers obsessively track their backlinks, pagerank, and traffic numbers. I see it a lot, and it's strange to me. I don't chase those numbers. I couldn't even tell you how many readers I have, or what my presentation ratings were. I don't mean to sound glib, but I don't care.
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http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000702.html

[JavaJones]

Yes, this is good advice. I think what's important to focus on here though is not necessarily that it's anti-marketing or anti-monetization. It's against making money by capitalizing on whatever is populat, and in favor of simply being successful (which can include making money - perhaps lots) at what you're really good at or interested in.

Really it's just acknowledging that content is king, and if you do what you enjoy and are good at, generating content around your real interests and knowledge, then people will probably appreciate it. If you are doing something for everyone else, you either get very shallow interest, or quick interest that doesn't last, or most likely none at all. People are interested in opinion, perspective, passion. If you are passionate about something, express it. Likeminded people will gravitate to that.

I guess another important part of this then is "don't care about what people who aren't interested in what you're doing think". In other words why should you care what Joe Public or the mainstream think if you want to blog about the best way to write a cross-platform random number generator? Care about what people who also are interested in that subject think, and chances are those people will come to you to talk about it if you express that interest. Increasing market share and readership is only relevant to the degree that there even is a readership for your given subject. Unless you happen to be blogging about the latest Britney Spears gossip chances are your market is going to be a tiny fraction of the general public, so don't sweat it too much.

So in short, I agree.

- Oshyan

[mouser]

i'll just make a slight disagreement with this part:

Really it's just acknowledging that content is king, and if you do what you enjoy and are good at, generating content around your real interests and knowledge, then people will probably appreciate it.

everything i've seen in this world tells me that unfortunately content is not king - it's important to be sure but it seems to me it's unfortunately rarely the main thing that matters.

however, what i take from this is not that the most important thing to success is to focus on your idea rather your audience, but rather that in not worrying so much about the audience you will be happier and less stressed out and more true to the project.

[JavaJones]

Well, I don't mean to say that you will get the *biggest* audience by having good content. Perhaps only the *best* audience.

- Oshyan